"Women Didn't Use to Be So Slutty or Have So Much Sex"

So ur take is —- you don’t really think the average social media modern girls (19-30yo) bodycount is higher than pre social media era? I know nobody can be sure. But hard to imagine it’s not higher now imo

— Don ladder (@DonLadder) November 6, 2024

There is this meme that’s been going around for about 8,000 years now that women in the past didn’t use to have as much sex with guys as they do today, that previous generations were purer, and that only recently have women become a lot more promiscuous and started sleeping around with men more.

You can read about it in the complaints of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabs from 1,500 to 2,500 years ago.

The ancient Chinese 2,000 years ago were so upset about women acting sluttier than they had in the past that they wrote an entire moral guide for women on how to not act slutty and be a good wife entitled Biographies of Exemplary Women and used it in the moral instruction of girls and women for two millennium.

Jesus’s apostles marched all around the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago, inveighing against the promiscuity they found everywhere (too many verses to list), and the Hebrew Bible from hundreds or thousands of years earlier found promiscuity such a problem it had to add specific instructions telling the daughters of priests not to go whoring (Leviticus 21:9) and women to stop cheating on their husbands (Hebrews 13:4).

We don’t have records dealing with increasing promiscuity in the women from ancient Sumer 8,000 years ago (so far as I’m aware) but based on this complaint occurring in every other epoch it was almost certainly a complaint of the civilized men then too.

Jean-Jacques Rosseau, writing in France in the 18th Century, called female promiscuity a “threat to social order” and recommended that women be taught to focus on domesticity rather than intellectual pursuits, lest they run around sleeping with men everywhere and upend society.

Men are still complaining about this phenomenon today: the apparent continuously rising tide of sluttiness in the women of every passing generation.

Men have complained of this phenomenon so long in so many places that by now you’d expect there to be some kind of SLUT APOCALYPSE, with women going to bed with hundreds of men before they even leave their teens.

But instead, the median number of lifetime sex partners for an American woman in the 21st Century is not hundreds nor thousands, but 3.

Yet why does it seem always, at all times and places, that women were purer in the past?

 

Your Grandfather’s Generation Was Not So Pure

A century ago from when I am writing this article, way back in the year 1925, a time that most men in 2024 would probably imagine was filled with virginal women, The Independent published an interview with 16-year-old New Yorker Sadie Brown, a sweatshop worker and Polish immigrant, who described her relationship with her lover, a boy named Henry. Theirs was not a virginal puppy love:

Henry is tall and dark, and he has a small mustache. His eyes are brown and large. He is pale and much educated, having been to school. He knows a great many things and has some money saved I think nearly $400. He is not going to be in a sweatshop all the time, but will soon be in the real estate business, for a lawyer that knows him well has promised to open an office and pay him to manage it.

Henry has seen me home every night for a long time and makes love to me. He wants me to marry him, but I am not seventeen yet, and I think that is too young. He is only nineteen, so we can wait.

I found this snippet while reading through old periodicals researching a book on the history of relationships I’ve since scrapped. Among the other gems I uncovered was the discovery that flappers in the 1920s referred to wedding rings as “handcuffs” or “manacles” and recommended that women put off marrying as long as possible – that way they could continue to enjoy the single life (and other men). After marriage, the flappers felt, the party ended.

…

I’ll be honest, as a kid I assumed that people didn’t really have sex in the past and that my generation was the first really promiscuous one. I’d heard about Woodstock and the Summer of Love in 1969 and people talking about “free love” and whatnot, but I figured they probably didn’t really mean it and actually just held hands or something.

Because, after all, my generation was the first really slutty one.

One day when talking to my mother I made some remark about how men “shouldn’t date women they have sex with on the first date.” (I don’t really think that anymore – it depends on the guy’s skill level and how he met the girl. If you’re very good with girls you will get a lot of first date lays with girls who’ve never gone to bed with a man that fast before and likely will not ever again)

My mother said, “Well it’s a good thing I waited until the second date with your dad!”

At the time my father met my mother, she was in a four-year relationship with another man, whom “she knew she would not marry.” When her boyfriend’s sister caught her holding hands with my father, she knew she had to tell her boyfriend about her new lover and break it off with him.

Her mother, my maternal grandmother, told me about picking up guys in bars in the 1940s.

My paternal grandmother said when she went to meet my paternal grandfather’s father for the first time, also in the 1940s, she was led upstairs to his London penthouse only to find him naked in bed with two much younger women.

Errol Flynn was perhaps the most prolific seducer Hollywood has ever seen. He boasted of 14,000 lays, including women he picked up in bars, on the street, and of course in the massive parties he threw, where he’d sometimes entertain the guests by playing piano with his penis. This was not in the 2020s; it was in the 1930s. Flynn wasn’t merely prolific because he was famous, either; he’d been picking up women as a no-name scoundrel and adventurer before he’d ever set foot on a movie stage.

St. Augustine – who famously prayed “God, grant me chastity and continence – but not yet” picked up women via day game on the streets of Alexandria in the 4th Century, knocking up one of his conquests and siring a child out of wedlock.

Ovid picked up women at the Circus in ancient Rome in 1st Century, often sleeping with his targets’ maidservants first then instructing them to put a good word in for him with their mistresses, that way he could bed the ladies of the upper crust as well – which he did by pulling them home for sex from parties.

READ MORE: How to Pick Up Girls in Ancient Rome (According to Ovid)

Perhaps more familiar to you are the escapades of Casanova, who had little problem finding women to sleep with as he traipsed about Europe in the 18th Century. Some modern scholars date the origins of pickup artistry to 18th Century France, but as we’ve seen with Ovid and St. Augustine, it dates back far earlier than that.

While it might seem that way to the innocent eye, people in generations past are never the pure hearted naïfs younger generations somehow always imagine them to have been.

But still, why?

 

People in the 2020s Are Having Less Sex, Not More

I started hearing in the early 2010s that young people were having less sex.

It wasn’t until 2018 we got good data on it.

I shared more statistics on the plunging interest in sex and dating in this article.

The rate of sexless men aged 18-30 ballooned further, from 28% to 31%, in 2019.

Then, 2020, of course, ushered in sweeping government ‘shelter in place’ lockdowns that kept many single people completely isolated in their homes. Depending on locale, some people weren’t able to go outside to socialize for 18 months. We’d have to imagine the rate of men and women not having sex only increased from there.

In 2023, a Pew study caught fire after claiming that 63% of men aged 18-29 were single vs. only 34% of women aged 18-29.

The same study found that single men and women alike are looking for love less now than in the past.

Of course, 2/3 of men claiming to be ‘single’ while only 1/3 of women claim to be suggests there’s something wrong with the poll – for instance, people having different definitions of ‘single’ (i.e., a guy and a girl are three months into a casual relationship. The guy intends for it to stay casual; the girl hopes it might get serious. When asked separately, the guy claims to be ‘single’ while the girl says she is ‘not single’).

A 2021 study found that all forms of sexual intercourse declined from 2009 to 2018. Some of the changes:

• 76% of adults had vaginal sex in 2009; this fell to 72% in 2018 (a 7% drop)

• 21% of teenagers aged 14-17 had vaginal sex in 2009; this fell to just 11% in 2018 (48% drop)

• Among teenagers, even solo masturbation decreased

Overall, in general, in 2020s USA, as well as in a lot of other places, men and women alike are having less sex.

Yet despite very obvious trends of rising sexlessness among people pretty much everywhere, the idea persists that now, in this time, right in this moment, women are nevertheless more promiscuous than they were in the past.

If this is an illusion – and at least in some times (like in the 2020s Western world) it is – what is responsible for this illusion?

 

What Makes Current Generations Appear More Promiscuous

Take a walk down the street today.

I have a homework assignment for you when you do.

I want you to look at all the little old ladies you pass. If you’re in a populous area, I’m guessing you will see at least 20 or 30 of them.

Now I want you to ask yourself how many men each of those little old ladies has fucked.

Did you guess it was a lot? Here, I’ll help you out with some stats.

Based on our 2023 survey of American women and men, for women 55 years and older:

• 30% of those cute little old ladies you saw have had sex with 10+ men

• 15% of those cute little old ladies you saw have had sex with 15+ men

• 5.5% of those cute little old ladies you saw have had sex with 30+ men

• 3% of those cute little old ladies you saw have had sex with 100+ men

That means if you saw 30 little old ladies when you were out perambulating:

• 9 of them has banged 10+ men

• 5 of those 9 has actually banged 15+ men

• 2 of those 5 has actually banged 30+ men

• 1 of those 2 has actually banged 100+ men

One of those little old ladies you passed by on the street has fucked 100+ men!

Granny, how could you!

Of course, there are more little old ladies who haven’t had that many men than there are those who’ve had lots. The median lifetime partner count for American women 55+ is still 3. But half of women are above the median.

It seems strange to imagine it, because you don’t sexualize little old ladies in your mind. It’s hard to imagine them as young, inquisitive women with hormones swirling and various romantic and sexual motives in play. Now they’re just grandmas.

But because we don’t think of older generations – whose youth we did not witness (after all, it occurred before we existed!), and whose sex drives are, by the time we are alive, a shade of what they were in their own youths – as promiscuous, we fall into a trap of comparing people today to the imagined chaste people of yesteryear.

Yet the people of yesteryear were not so chaste as we imagine.

How about the current generations though – are they not more sexualized?

 

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

You turn on social media, and what do you see? Sexy bodies everywhere! Women flaunting their assets for any attention they can get!

You surf the web and encounter pornography: every which way, women engaged in the most depraved acts imaginable. Dogs, horses, gang bangs, bukkake, you name it, women are doing it.

You watch the movies, you watch shows, you read books, you surf websites, and it’s just sex, sex, sex, sex.

Sex sells, as any ad man knows.

Humans have long filled their media with sex. The Bible is full of tawdry stories; Confucius lamented the corrupting effects of popular Chinese sex songs 2,500 years ago; and the oldest recorded story, of Gilgamesh, dating back some 4,000 years, describes Gilgamesh’s ravishing of the maids of Uruk and how his foil, Enkidu the wild man, was at last tamed by the sexual lures of the temple prostitute Shamhat.

Of course we know that the more people see something, the more they believe it is going on. So too with sex in the media. Show someone constant sex in the media he consumes and he will believe everyone is having lots of sex, all of the time. Perhaps only he is really left out, if he isn’t having any!

Here’s a 2006 study on how sex in the media influence college students’ perceptions:

In this study we examined how media contribute to college students' erroneous perceptions of peer norms and the consequences of such misperceptions. The data came from a survey of 312 college students. Results indicate that students believed that their peers were significantly more sexually permissive than was actually the case. The data suggested that they formed such erroneous impressions of peers based in part on their perceptions of media influence on peers. Some evidence also indicated that these misperceptions produced a significant impact on male college students, making them more likely to say they would engage in casual sexual activity and engage in it at an earlier stage in dating.

In other words, college students:

• Believed other college students were a lot more into casual sex than they actually were,

• Believed this because they thought the media influenced their peers to be more sexual,

• And, if they were male, it made them more want to engage in casual sex, and do so sooner, presumably in order to keep up with the competition.

Put even more simply,

 

Reality Is Hard to Grasp

Humans don’t handle nuance well.

One of the major bugbears of the seduction community from around 2007-2016 or so was ‘Madonna-whore complex’.

This wasn’t the Madonna-whore complex of marital psychology, where a man becomes unable to have sex with his wife after she’s given birth to his child because he can only see her as a mother (Madonna) now, and instead must seek out sex with other women he is still capable of viewing as sexualized ‘whores’.

In 2007-2016 seduction community parlance, ‘Madonna-whore’ referred to the tendency of most men to break women down into two (2) camps:

1. Chaste & virginal ‘good girls’

2. Slutty, easy, fuckable ‘baddies’

But something happened with the mainstreaming of Tinder, Instagram, and the red pill movement. Somewhere around 2016 or so, more and more men began to view women as ‘mostly whores’ or even ‘entirely whores’.

The already oversimplified view of the world men held before, splitting girls into just two camps, simplified itself again, throwing all women into a single camp: the whore camp.

All this happened as women had less sex and fewer partners than they’d had in decades, on average.

Part of why it happened was the media.

I’ve talked on here many times before about how media is used to control your mind.

I’ve encouraged you to break free of media conditioning and turn off the glowing screens.

The media you consume makes you think women are much more promiscuous than they are – more promiscuous than they were in earlier generations, in fact, instead of less (the reality is they are less).

There are other factors at play as well.

It’s easy to get a ‘promiscuous woman selection bias’ depending on how you are dating. This is most true if you’re meeting women through dating apps or nightlife (which tend to attract more promiscuous women and scare off less promiscuous ones), but is true even if you meet women via day game or social circle – simply due to the dating habits of promiscuous vs. non-promiscuous women.

That is to say, the minority of promiscuous women simply does a lot more dating and sexing than the majority of not-so-promiscuous girls.

READ MORE: Selection Bias in the Women You Date

Mix up the media sex bombardment with some statistically normal encounters with promiscuous and super promiscuous women, together with the seemingly asexual nature of mothers and grandmothers (now past their reproductive primes), and you’ve got a recipe for believing that women are a much more promiscuous than they used to be.

A third factor is the rising tide of totally plugged in men having no real-life experiences with women at all. These men are, in essence, ‘super media believers’. This segment of plugged in, matrix-inhabiting men are men we call incels.

We didn’t have an ‘incel community’ 15 years ago like we do today.

There were men back then who were ‘involuntarily celibate’: guys who wanted to be having sex but were not. But mostly they weren’t mad at women. Some were. But most were frustrated at themselves, or perpetually hopeful in the friend zone, or content to play the role of nice guy providers hoping for a chance to ‘win’. They had exposure to plenty of women in the real world; they were friends with women; they had far more realistic glimpses into what women’s lives were really like.

Today the huge mass of incels not participating in the sexual marketplace shuns the friend zone and stops going outside. Today’s incels don’t socialize, and have little exposure to real women, but they DO have lots of exposure to sexualized women in the media. For these men, all women (those women they see at a distance through their screens) appear to be ferociously sexualized.

Needless to say, your average ‘boring’ girl with three lifetime partners and a long-term boyfriend she plans to marry is not going around advertising herself all over Instagram or porn sites, so you don’t even see her.

Unfortunately, these totally plugged in, virtual reality-living men have outsized voices online – they are Internet natives with loads of free time to talk online and amplify one another’s voices.

If you don’t think these matrix-inhabiting incels are coloring mass opinion with their completely media-formed views, let me tell you: they are.

 

This Trope Will Never Go Away

I’ve just explained to you that the women of today (provided you are reading this in the 21st Century West) are less promiscuous than any time in recent history.

I’ve shown you modern stats and studies. I’ve given you ample examples of men going back for millennia lamenting the promiscuity of the women of their days, and lain out examples of promiscuity from past decades and centuries.

But do you believe it? It’s a hard impression to change, isn’t it!

Even if you know logically that women are less promiscuous, you’ve been so saturated with media and probably had enough experiences with promiscuous women yourself – meanwhile not having lived through prior generations and only seen their women as old grannies past their dating prime – that it feels like girls today are just slutting it up left, right, and center.

It feels that way… but your mental model is flawed.

50,000 years from now, men will be opining that the women of their days are so much more promiscuous than the women of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. And their great-grandmothers? Perfect saints, mind you!

This is simply a generational bias that cannot be undone with facts, figures, or even anecdotes.

It can only be understood logically; never emotionally nor experientially.

There’s no way for you to live through the past. Only today.

If you’re alive today, and you’re thinking about women’s promiscuity – whether because you want to sleep with more girls and you are hoping women get more promiscuous! … or because you want a virginal girl who’ll love you forever and never stray – fretting over generational changes real or imagined doesn’t help you.

Instead, figure out what you want; figure out where you’ll need to go, whom you’ll need to be, and what you’ll need to do to get it; then go and do it.

READ MORE: The Unicorn Hunter

In every age of man there’ve been countless women from the pristinely virginal to the wildly promiscuous.

There are just as many American women who will die virgins today as there are women who will die with 100+ partners. There are equal numbers of American women who’ll die having only ever been with one man (15% of women) as there are women who’ll die having been with 15+ (a separate 15% of women).

This is true for every age – it always has been, and always will be (the percentages of women having more or fewer partners might change; but there are always promiscuous women, there are always chaste women, and there are always women in between).

Whatever girl or girls you’re looking for, stop worrying about whether they’re more or less common, and go figure out how to bring them into your life.

Chase Amante

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